


Between Hawk and Werewolf

by aeris7dragon



Series: Battered Mettle [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Demons, F/F, F/M, LGBT, M/M, Monsters, Multi, Original work - Freeform, Paranormal, Vampires
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-14 04:15:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29289696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeris7dragon/pseuds/aeris7dragon
Summary: Theron Ketterer's world is turned upside-down when he discovers the death of his mother was no accident. Little does he know that's only the beginning.
Series: Battered Mettle [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2151021





	1. Prologue

“The experiment was a success,” Dr. Grant concluded. He put the pointer down in the trough of the chalkboard and pushed the glasses back up the brim of his nose. “On that note, I think we should test further.”

The man at the other end of the table eyed him coldly and silently, his bony fingers laced on the faux mahogany grain. His hair was white and wispy and was combed back, and his wrinkles, though numerous, had an elasticity to them rather than a loose sag. As if he was born with them. The eyes that regarded Dr. Grant were those of a demon--a pale gold, with pupils sharp and narrow as knives. He was dressed sharply, as well, his suit black and neatly pressed with a blood-red bow tie. Even if the scientist wasn’t aware of the man’s inhuman nature, he would have been able to candidly pick him out as a vampire. He just fit the part.

“Test further,” Malachi repeated. “As in?”

“As in, find another specimen to test on,” Dr. Grant explained. “Preferably one a bit more...intact than Mr. Ketterer was when we brought him in.”

“You mean, don’t send a werewolf out to retrieve him this time,” Malachi stated flatly.

The doctor felt the blood drain from his face. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Before Ketterer, the specimens we had used were deceased, and they all failed. We had hoped that Ketterer would die before he was possessed, leaving the otherworld entity--”

Malachi rolled his eyes. “‘Otherworld entity’,” he scoffed. “All this science mumbo-jumbo. Call it what it is.”

“Very well. Leaving the ‘demon’ to exist alone in the host’s body. The hope was to use a body that had recently ceased living, but it seemed that the presence of the host’s soul was necessary for proper compatibility.”

Malachi nodded, the first good sign Dr. Grant had all night. “I’ll have Zane go and retrieve some homeless fellow for you. When would you like this done?”

“Actually, if I may.” Dr. Grant opened the file folder he’d had sitting on the table, and pulled out a paper. “This is the medical records of a specimen we’ve had our eyes on for a while. He has family, but we’ve taken measures to deal with them. He’s here in the city on a family trip from Japan. Perhaps…”

Malachi gave the paper a cursory glance, his eyes lingering on the photo stapled to the top. “Very well. Give me the address and the time, and I’ll have Zane go out and retrieve this...Sugihara.”

“That’s actually his surname. In Asia, the order of given and family names are switched, so…” Dr. Grant drifted off when he saw the disinterested look on Malachi’s face warning him not to waste time with semantics. He nodded. “All right. The address to the place he’s staying is in this folder. It’s a hotel right by Hobble Creek, as luck would have it. As for time, as soon as possible would be best.”

Malachi gave an affirmative dip of his head. Getting up, he slid the paper back into the folder and tucked the entire folder under his arm.

“You will have your new test subject by ten PM,” he stated flatly as he left the room.

Dr. Grant sighed in some relief. He’d been stressing out over this meeting for days; now that it was over, he felt like a weight had been lifted.

And soon, he could get back to work. He smiled at the thought. For so long, he’d been pondering over the paperwork. The notes. The formulas. The results and the conclusions. Soon he would be able to actually  _ work.  _ And he was looking forward to playing with this new specimen.

He headed out of the room and down to the lower level. It was in a similar room, five years ago, where he’d seen his first positive result. He’d set one boy down on the circle carved into the concrete, and watched as he regrew limbs and regained consciousness from a near-death state. It had been fascinating to watch the wounds knit back together without so much as a scar.

Soon he’d set another specimen in the circle and watch what unfolded. He was quite looking forward to it.

*

“Ryū? Where’d you run off to?”

Taka ran through the streets, panic beginning to set in. He’d looked away from his younger brother for what felt like two seconds, and when he’d turned around the toddler was gone, swept up in the chaos that was the crowd of Hobble City, Utah. Being from Shibuya, Taka wasn’t a stranger to crowds, but this place and its people were a lot different from what he was used to. He didn’t know why he’d thought it would be okay to glance away for a second.

He pushed his way through the throngs, ignoring the dirty looks cast his way. “Gotta find him,” he muttered to himself.

Someone grabbed his hand, and for a moment he was relieved. Ryū had found him after all, and judging by the strength in his grip, he was scared and about to ask his big brother to take him back to the hotel. But as Taka looked down, that relief vanished. The hand wrapping around his was pale, in complete contrast to Ryū’s dark complexion. The nails were painted black, the polish chipped badly around the tips. Gold rings decorated the bony knuckles. Most importantly, the hand was that of an adult.

Taka looked up into the face of the person who’d grabbed his hand. The face was just as bony as the hand and framed with long and greasy black hair, silver eyes underlined with heavy bags and thick black eyeliner, mouth twisted into a sinister smile.

Taka’s heart stopped when he saw the fangs peeking out between the stranger’s lips.

He said something in English. Taka’s English wasn’t very good, but he caught his name in between the barely-familiar syllables.

This man knew him.

He wrenched his hand away, his search for Ryū temporarily forgotten in light of a new goal--to escape. Whatever this man wanted from him, he didn’t want to find out. He broke free from the crowd and nearly ran into someone else.

“ _ Sumimasen _ ,” he said, trying to skirt around the man, but was again stopped by a hand, this one on his shoulder. The man looked to be in his teens--he was stocky and shorter than the other, with dirty blond hair styled in a mullet and a denim vest over a black band T-shirt.

Taka moved to pull away from him, then saw the eyes staring him down from a deadpan expression. They were the same color as the other stranger’s.

He said something, but Taka was in a panic now and he ripped away from the man’s hand, barely able to make out what was said. Unbalanced, he stumbled and fell, wincing as the impact sent a sharp pain up his backside. In any other situation, he might be humiliated, falling on his ass in front of a complete stranger.

The blond hauled him up by the front of his collar. Out of the corner of his eye, Taka saw the dark outline of the first stranger separating from the crowd.

Then something knocked into his head, and his vision went dark.

*

When he opened his eyes, it was still dark. Taka felt like he was inside, but the swirling motions in the near-black suggested clouds. He made an attempt to get up, but found himself completely frozen.

It was familiar, though. He distantly recalled feeling unable to move like this before. The surface of his skin tingling, almost vibrating. The weight of something sitting on his chest. The absolute inability to move even a finger, no matter how hard he willed it to just twitch. A thrumming in his ears, sounding like someone’s speech recorded and played through a speaker right beside his ear, too loud to make out any real words. He knew what he’d see if he tilted his eyes downward, and just to prove to himself that he would, he did just that. After all, whenever he saw it, he always woke up. So maybe, if he looked at the thing sitting on his chest, he’d wake up back in the hotel room, with his brother curled up next to him and the steady, light snoring of their mother in the other bed.

So he tilted his eyes downward and saw it.

It was just a shadow, a strangely elongated shadow of a person. Taka never could figure out whether it was male or female, but he didn’t think it mattered. Two sickly yellow slits cast faint light around the eye area, almost distinguishing the shape of a nose between them.

It took Taka a moment to realize he wasn’t waking up. He was staring, taking in the hazy shape of the shadow and trying to move, but he wasn’t waking up. He felt nothing but the solid surface beneath him and the weight on his chest, and as he stared, he realized that the shadow was getting closer.

The thrumming near his ears grew louder, and the staticky noise shrouding the words began to clear. He heard, clear as day, the voice of the shadow, and though it was speaking in English he understood every single word.

“Your body is mine now, boy.”

He opened his mouth, and before he could be surprised that he was able to open his mouth the shadow surged forward. He felt it breach his mouth and gagged as it tore down his throat, and the tingling and the thrumming overpowered his frozen body as he felt himself being crumpled up and stuffed down like a piece of paper in the wastebasket.

He couldn’t even scream.


	2. The Big Bad

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A sort of introduction. Mild racism cw.

April 10, 1977

At first glance, it was a normal rainy morning in the suburbs of New York City. The Sunday traffic was light, and the colors that young Theron Ketterer could see were mainly silvery-gray and the pale yellow from street lights that had yet to wink off for the day. The gloom of the outdoors didn't matter much to him, though. It may have been wet and cold outside, but he didn't have to play outside. Not with his best friend coming over to play with him.

Out of the corner of his eye he thought he caught a glimpse of a shadow slinking out of view, but when he turned to look, it was gone.

Theron let his chin drop to his hands, pressing his mouth up against the couch cushion he was currently propping himself on to look out the window. He'd been sitting up like that so long that his neck was starting to hurt, but he didn't want to look away from the window. Not when his best friend was on his way. Theron wanted to be the first one to greet him.

He watched as a car pulled up, but it was the wrong one. This car was long, super-shiny, and black. The one he was waiting for was green, and not very shiny at all. So when this car stopped in front of the house, he sat up again, tilting his head in some confusion. He got up and ran over to the door, just in time for the doorbell to ring. He pried open the door with all the force a five-year-old could muster, only a moment later hearing Mom call out from the other room.

"Hang on a moment!" she said.

Oops.

He looked up. A man stood there, and immediately Theron didn't think he liked him. He looked nice enough; his mustache curved into a smile as he looked back down at him, and he bent down to ruffle Theron's hair, but his eyes looked cold, even as they squinted to see him better. He found himself shrinking away from the man and hiding partially behind the door.

"Theron, get back in the house." His mother's voice surprised him, and she sounded mad. Madder, even, than when he was naughty. That, coupled with the strange man in front of him, scared him enough that he backed up without protest and went back to his spot on the couch.

In the entryway, Mom spoke in a quiet voice. "What the hell are you doing here? I told you never to visit me at home. If it's an emergency, you can call me."

"We found one," the man said, just as hushed. "This isn't something you can just hear over the phone."

"Yes, it is. I told you, I don't want my son to hear about this until he's old enough. You're endangering everything." Her voice got quieter. "I'm hosting a playdate today, Patrick. This is really horrible timing. I thought you were more careful than that."

“My apologies, Doctor.” The man’s voice sounded like sandpaper on rough wood. His tone at least made it sound like he was trying to be friendly, but Theron was already afraid of him, so it didn’t really work where he was concerned. “But I found a record of something that proves your theory right. The Peshtigo fire, in 1h871, I found documentation that seems to prove it was caused by unnatural means.”

“Look, I really don’t have time--”

“The fire was  _ black _ .”

Conversation halted for a moment. “You mean the smoke, right?” Mom finally asked.

“No. The fire itself. Smoke from wildfires and overgrowth is usually white, but the fire itself was black. Well, more accurately, a sort of purplish-black. That just doesn’t happen, even with magical fire. Fire can be virtually every fire, but never black.”

“Be that as it may, it could have waited,” Mom said. “Look, show me the document at work tomorrow, okay? My son’s friend is on his way, and his mom will be with him. They can’t know about all this.”

Theron wondered if he should stop listening. This all sounded like big, important stuff, too big for little ears like his. He wondered if he'd get in trouble for it, or for opening the door in the first place. The man hadn't been wearing a doctor's coat, but he had to be a doctor if he was talking to Mom about work.

Mom was a doctor, but no one ever believed him when he said it. She was a girl, they said. That meant she was probably a nurse. Nurses were girls, doctors were boys. The teacher at kindergarten especially hadn't believed him, until one day Mom had come to pick him up. He was goofing off, she told her, telling people she was a doctor.

But she was, she'd told the teacher. She was doing research on a different species of non-humans, in order to treat them better for diseases.

The teacher had looked flustered and dropped the subject, and the next time she caught Theron playing with the other girls in class, letting the girls be the doctors while he laid down on the table waiting for his "surgery", she didn't say a word.

He looked up, shaking off the memory, when he heard the sound of a familiar car. He stood on the cushions before remembering Mom had told him not to do that, and looked down the street to see an old green car pull up and park in front of the shiny black one.

Theron grinned in excitement and jumped down to race for the door before remembering the man was still there. He stopped short, looking up at him, and the man looked back down at him before looking back up at Mom.

"I'll leave the documents on your desk for you to see when you come in tomorrow, Dr. Ketterer," he finally said, then turned and headed to his car, nodding a greeting at the woman getting out of the green car.

Khalil's mom had a pinched scowl on her face, but she always looked like that. Theron always wondered if her face had gotten stuck because she was always angry, like how Mom always said Theron's face would get stuck if he kept frowning.

Whatever happened next was a blur to Theron, because the woman was opening the door to the back seat and letting out his friend. Khalil's neatly trimmed, dark blond hair was already messy, and fell into his big brown eyes like he was a sheepdog. Theron giggled when he saw the goofy grin on his friend's face.

Khalil's mom tried to get him to follow her, but the moment she unbuckled his seatbelt he rolled out of the car and hit the ground running. Theron ran toward him, but was still caught off guard as the other boy nearly knocked him off his feet.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the shiny black car back up and drive off. Once it was out of view, that man was immediately forgotten, in favor of his friend, who was currently doing his best to squeeze the stuffing out of him.

"Mom says you get to stay all day!" Theron said happily, barely aware of their moms talking in the background.

Khalil beamed, showing off the gap in his teeth where one was missing. "Yeah, I know!" he said. "Mom says it's 'cause she has to go to the doctor and Dad doesn't wanna be stuck with me."

Khalil had an accent that made it a little hard to understand him, but it wasn't as bad as his mom's. Theron's mom had called it a "Brooklyn" accent, which didn't make much sense to Theron, since Khalil's mom was not named Brooklyn.

"Keep Khalil outta trouble, yeah? I'll be back to pick him up afterward. Probably around seven." With those words, she sucked a breath through the cigarette in her mouth and patted Khalil's head--the boy cringing a little as she did so. Theron watched her rush to her car to get out of the rain.

Mom sighed, but smiled down at them. Theron smiled back; he knew how tired she was sometimes, but he thought she wouldn't have to try too hard to smile if he did it, too. Somehow, though, that usually made her smile bigger.

"Nice to have you today, Khalil. You two go play in the pillow fort and I'll bring you lunch, okay?"

"Pillow fort!" Khalil said in excitement. Theron was dragged along as his friend rushed inside, both of them giggling on the way.

In the living room, Theron and Mom had used most of the pillows in the house to make a big fort. It had been hard not to jump inside before Khalil got there, so there was a mess of toys on the floor around it; parts of an erector set and a few Micronauts were strewn about with Theron's drawing supplies, while the TV crackled with some cartoon on the entertainment center.

"Wait!" Theron said, getting an idea. When Khalil stopped to look at him, he cupped an ear with a hand, pretending to listen to something. "Did you hear something?"

Khalil blinked and shook his head, confused. Theron rolled his eyes; his friend was missing the point.

"No, no, did you  _ hear  _ something." He grinned mischievously.

Khalil grinned, finally catching on. He quickly raised his hands to hide the smile and gasped dramatically. "Oh, no! What was that?"

"It's probably the… Big Bad Shmoogy!" He'd made up the most terrifying word he could think of, but it seemed to fit. He spoke quietly, just in case a monster waited to jump out and eat them if they spoke louder than a whisper. "We have to hide if we don't want him to find us!"

Khalil giggled, keeping his hands over his mouth. Theron, dodging around Hot Wheels, led him to the front "door" of their pillow fort. Inside was a bowl of cheese-flavored corn puffs and a plate with two diagonally-cut sandwiches. Khalil gasped in delight, and his face went from playfully scared to hungry in a matter of seconds.

"Can I have some?" he asked in a normal voice, their play forgotten for the moment. Theron giggled.

"Of course you can, silly, that's why it's here," he said. "Mom said we have to share, though, okay?"

He remembered his mom saying that Khalil didn't always have snack food lying around, so Theron had to be extra good about sharing with him. "You get to have this all the time, when you ask for it," she'd told him. "But Khalil never gets it, so you should let him have a little more than you."

But it wasn't as if she had to tell him twice. Of course he'd share with his best friend.

Khalil gleefully went for the bowl, coming up with fistfuls of cheese puffs that were already crushed in his small hands. Orange powder and yellow crumbs piled in his lap. He stuffed his mouth full of them, then grinned at Theron with stained teeth.

"Are these to protect us from the Big Bad Shmoogy?" he asked with his mouth full, spitting crumbs everywhere.

"Ew, gross," Theron laughed, wiping his face. He looked at the bowl, then nodded, deciding on the fly. "Yeah, it's just like garlic for vampires!"

"They only don't like garlic because it hurts their noses, you know," Khalil said, going in for more cheese puffs.

Theron tilted his head. "How do you know that? I thought it was poisonous."

"A pretty lady told me!" he said. "Remember, the one I said who found me when I got lost after dark and she helped me get home? And then Daddy was all mean to her and told me to stay away from...uh… 'her kind'?"

Theron took a cheese puff and ate it thoughtfully. "Oh yeah, you told me. Because your dad is mean to people when they're a different color," he said. "But how do you know she wasn't a vampire?"

Khalil giggled and threw a cheese puff at him. "Because she would've eated me, stupid!" He looked at the plate with the sandwiches, and took one to take the biggest bite he could. “I don’t know why Daddy doesn’t like so many people. I mean, she helped me. And there are vampires and stuff, and those are scary and hurt people.”

“Maybe your dad just doesn’t like anyone,” Theron said. He then grinned. “Maybe he’s the Big Bad Shmoogy!”

Khalil giggled. “Maybe! We don’t have cheese puffs at home, he could be allergic to them!”

The two took turns getting into the cheese puffs and eating bites of their sandwiches. At one point they started throwing the snacks at each other, trying to get them into each other’s mouths but missing every time. Khalil giggled when he got one on top of Theron’s head, and Theron retaliated with a cackle as he got one right between Khalil’s eyes.

All too soon, Theron found himself waking up from a nap he hadn’t meant to take, the now-collapsed pillow fort shifting as his mom picked up the pillows and hauled the boys up onto the couch. She turned the TV on to a channel that worked, and turned it down. The sound effects from a commercial for the new spaceship movie buzzed in the background, explosions and lasers barely making sounds louder than a whisper.

“I wanna see that,” he said, quietly enough not to wake Khalil, who was still snoring as loud as his little lungs would allow.

Mom turned around, smiling at him as she carefully tiptoed back toward the couch. “You do, huh?” she whispered. “Maybe we’ll take Khalil and see it opening night. Is that a good idea?”

He nodded excitedly, then yawned. He was having a hard time keeping his eyes open.

Mom smiled wider and ruffled his curls, then leaned in and kissed his forehead. “Okay. We’ll do that. Go back to sleep, sweetheart, I’ll wake you for lunch.”

He closed his eyes. He felt her tucking a blanket around him, then heard her do the same for Khalil before her footsteps left the room. He smiled to himself, thinking how glad he was for such a nice mommy, before falling asleep again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> not sure i like this chapter at all, but there's some important stuff in it so I'm not sure what to do. constructive criticism is appreciated.


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